


A permanent air

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: Canon Relationships, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Music, Pre-Canon, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-03
Updated: 2014-05-03
Packaged: 2018-01-21 09:04:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1545215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'There was a permanent air of improvisation, Laurie thought, about Sandy Reid.'</p><p>*</p><p>Content advisory: implications of self-harm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A permanent air

**Author's Note:**

  * For [havisham](https://archiveofourown.org/users/havisham/gifts).



The small local had a ship’s piano in the back room, a little five-octave thing less than four foot wide. Sandy yearned to it as proficient pianists who have lacked an instrument of their own for some years tend to. He tried a few chords and winced sourly; by the time Alec had got a round in he had the fallboard and lower front panel off.

‘It’s all right, Len, he knows what he’s doing.’ Alec, less than certain himself, attempted to forestall the landlord’s remonstration.

‘It’s only a jury-rig.’ Sandy said into the soundboard, his voice a hollow muffle. ‘You should get it tuned properly: a pub should have a piano. Much nicer than the wireless.’

He vamped experimentally at first, moving by degrees into ‘Careless Love’, then improvised variations on it, working back to the tune. Growing in confidence as the company grew in warmth, he began to sing, even to scat a bit. He looked pinkly and unbecomingly astonished by the crackle of applause―he had not much practice at graceful acceptance of praise.

Ralph Lanyon, aged twenty-five and newly christened _old man_ to thirty-five souls, whom he would join in less than forty-eight hours in preparation for their first Atlantic duty, was being rather unfortunately devastating that evening. Anyone who knew him tolerably well might see that he was steadily engaged in scouring away, with a conscious display of hard, vivid charm, any personal vanity that accrued to this awful power and responsibility. But if you didn’t know him, or didn't care for him, it looked like the very opposite. He strolled up to the piano with measured insouciance, and rested his glass on top of it. Sandy noticed that Lanyon had what laypeople were apt to think of as _pianist's hands_ , _surgeon's hands_ : slender but strong-looking, with long, tapering fingers, quite unlike his own broad, blunt paws, raw from perpetual washing with carbolic soap. 

Lanyon twitched at his collar. ‘That was nicely done. You were improvising in the middle bit, weren’t you? Bloody clever.’

‘Eh, thanks. I’m no good really―out of practice, and―well, if you can play and choose to put your mind to it, it’s not that hard to improvise. But only some people can _really_ do it, if you know what I mean, and I'm not one of them.’

‘Sounded like the real thing to me. But I’ve no ear.’

‘You have, you know, if you could recognise the variations. You’d be astonished how few people are actually tone deaf.’

‘Really? I was always the boy told to turn over for the accompanist, because my row put the others off.’

Relaxing enough to laugh, Sandy made a playful feint towards him. ‘I’d _say_ so, you naughty creature.’

Lanyon swallowed most of his large gin-and-bitters at a gulp. ‘Oh God. Constant improvisation, and you never change the fucking tune. Extraordinary. Well, have a good night.’

Humourless bastard, Sandy thought. Whyever had Alec stuck it? He knew exactly why, of course, and that he couldn’t hope to live up to it. A couple of people wanted to buy him drinks, so he took them, swift and stiff, and went back to the piano, reflecting that you could scarcely get as pished as all that when your hands were occupied. He played jazz and blues mostly, pleasantly deflecting requests for brassy or saccharine song-hits. But there being few corrosive agents upon defences against sentimentality to match unmixed spirits and unacknowledged jealousy, before last orders he’d struck up ‘Ae Fond Kiss.’

He didn’t sing it sentimentally: his taste and training were too sound for that. The accompaniment he chose was minimal; offsetting his lyrical light baritone with an austere, implacable melancholy, and Sandy Reid, upon whom it had been painfully and repeatedly impressed that to seek attention was the filthiest and grossest of sins, suddenly found himself the uncontested cynosure of a packed, talkative room. It was a good deal more intoxicating than the six or seven doubles he’d downed in the interstices.

Of course a ribald acclamation went up at ‘Naething could resist my Nancy,’ but Sandy neither acquiesced in nor recoiled from it, his voice lifting in impersonal assertion of a first love immediate, irresistible and unending.

       —Never met, or never pairted,  
       We had ne’er been broken hearted.

       Fare ye weel, thou first and fairest  
       Fare ye weel, thou best and dearest—

It was not the words he was singing that made him glance over at Alec—they were, as sung words frequently are for their singer, almost meaningless—but pleasure in his mastery of tone, melody and inflection. It was tinged admittedly with a need for approbation, but a secure and companionable, not an urgent or abject one. Meaning—desperate, desolate, lonesome meaning—only flooded in when he saw the mark upon which Alec’s looks were fixed.

Sandy got through the song, the rest of his drink, and the streets back to their rooms with his dignity more or less intact, but the quarrel they had then set the template for every subsequent one, each more sordid than the last. For now, though, they were still at that stage of acquaintanceship in which the physical restraint of a violent demonstration of self-hatred might without discontinuity become an energetic demonstration of physical love, and the latter seem to resolve the trouble to mutual satisfaction. 

‘I suppose it wouldn’t do any good at all to say I was anticipating _Fare ye weel_ rather than reacting to _never pairted_ , would it?’

Sandy couldn’t help but smile, despite everything, at Alec’s unhandy attempt at even this lightest dusting of Scots. ‘Not really, no. Not when you consider the rest of the line. Or the next one.’

‘Um―’ Alec thought better of it, settling Sandy’s head on his chest instead. They lay in silence for a few moments.

‘I can see _fairest_.’ Sandy resumed. ‘In a less than literal way.’ Alec stroked his pale hair, snorting faintly. ‘But _first_ , how _first_?’

‘Oh Christ, Sandy, use your intelligence. You _know_ how _first_. Don’t make me say it, it’s not going to help.’

‘Why’d you fuck him about then, if he was?’ Sandy pulled back and sat up, suddenly savage, his voice ragged. ‘He wouldn’t have done it to you. The dear knows I’ve no cause to praise Ralph Lanyon, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that second R stood for Ruth―’

‘Ross. His mother’s maiden―Oh, I see, _whither thou goest_ and so forth. Don’t look at me in that Wee Free way. My people fancied themselves for Socialists, the bloody fools.’

‘Kirk of Scotland, dearie. It’s what the Wee Frees wanted to stop being, about three schisms since. But why?’ he persisted.

‘I don’t know the hell why. It’s finished. I don’t want to rake over it.’

‘I do, I think. Know why, I mean.’

‘The other too, by the sounds of it.’

‘Because you’ve never lost anyone.’

‘Delightful thing to say to a chap who buried his mother in his last year at prep school and his father six months ago, but do go on. It sounds _fascinating_.’

‘Alec, _please_ —’

‘All right, all right.’

‘Your parents _died_. You didn’t _lose_ them.’

‘I’m not really in the mood for Lady Bracknell, sorry.’

‘I’m not trying to say you haven’t grieved or suffered. I’m trying to explain why I’m jealous.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘And I’m not trying to excuse—’

Alec raised an intimidating eyebrow. Sandy flinched.

‘Don’t. It’s what _he_ does.’

‘I’m losing patience, my dear, whatever else I’ve managed to hang on to. Just tell me.’

‘My father left home when I was five weeks old. At first, Mother said he was killed in the war, but he wasn't. Even as a bairn you hear things, piece them together. And it never stops, the piecing together. I’ve a half-sister somewhere, a month younger than I am. I only found that out this last New Year. Mother always made it quite clear that it was because of me. Never in quite so many words, but for as far back as I can mind. People leave, and it’s my fault. I drive them away. That’s all, but.’

Alec nodded and drew him close again. ‘I know. But it’s really quite an ordinary dole of misery. You mustn’t let it take your self-respect.’

That was all very well, if you had self-respect in the first place. But Sandy saw, quite simply and dismally, that if he said so, Alec would understand it as self-pity, and despise him all the more.

‘I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. If you don’t go. You won’t go, will you?’

‘No, I shan’t go.’ Alec’s fingers played over his neck, shoulders and back in one of the adroit, practised caresses that left Sandy tingling in doubt of their provenance. ‘I shan’t go.’

And in the end, as it happened, he didn’t.

**Author's Note:**

> Roughly in the vicinity of zeen's prompt: 'The Ballad of Sandy Reid. Poor Sandy! He really gets a raw deal in the novel, but there's hints of depths in his character that Laurie isn't interested in looking at.'
> 
> Laurie's assumption that his dislike of brassy vibrato is Good Taste while Sandy's is roughly _ugh, girls_ is pretty vintage catty!Laurie. I have a bit of a soft spot for Sandy and wanted there to be something he's good at. This is such stuff as headcanon is made on.
> 
> The full text of Robert Burns' song 'Ae Fond Kiss' is [here](http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ae_Fond_Kiss,_and_Then_We_Sever). A selection of recordings: [Kenneth McKellar](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oBC4fej6jc), [ Andy M. Stewart,](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXWnuEbwlGA) [The Voice Squad](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Juvowm_1aWw).


End file.
